FEEDING NEMO

After months of waiting, pestering and disorganisation, I finally managed to get my open water diving license. AWESOME!

Em and I first contacted our instructor in August hoping to be certified by September. We had our first pool dive in August and that went swimmingly well (hur hur hur...). Next on the agenda for becoming certified were our two open water dives.

The next two months we endured:

"Sorry, the other people we were meant to go out with are sick so it's not cost effective for me to go out an extra time for you"

"Sorry, the boat's under repairs"

"Sorry, busy this Saturday, let's go on Sunday - call me on Saturday" ...except when we called on Saturday, the instructor happened to be out diving on his boat. Not sure why he was busy when we were initially scheduled for that day.

"Sorry, I've fallen off my boat and injured myself"

"Sorry, the weather's a bit choppy"

"Sorry, I'm sick"

"Boat's broken again"

And despite some of these being completely valid reasons for not going diving, it got rather tiresome after the 5th cancellation. I was beginning to think that it was a sign and that I wasn't meant to go diving. Anyway, we finally made a date to go out. The sun was batting for our team today and he also managed to chase away strong currents and winds.

Our wetsuits were on, water and snacks packed, information reference cards all ready to go and all the equipment was ready for us on the boat. Ready, set, dive.

The training spot for open water dives was in the middle of Suva harbour. There's an anchor spot where the boat was tied. The handy thing about this spot is that there's a rope between the anchor and the boat which you can pull yourself down on. It's a bit hard to sink the first few times. You're breathing heavily because you're anxious, you're going over all those details that your instructor went through with you 2 months ago, you're nervous as all hell that you might forget something, or something might go wrong...

And then you're greeted by the fish and the reef below you. There are blue ones, black and white striped ones, yellow ones, ones with huge black dots on their back. I've been told by one marine expert that recognising a fish by its colour is probably not the best way to identify a fish. However, the first time you go down, you're just mesmorised by the array of fish swimming away from you.

We were down for about 30 minutes and it was at this time that I wasn't feeling so great. As we were coming up, I felt an incredible wave of nausea come over me. I'm not entirely sure what happened or why, but I was about to establish my reputation as the chundering diver. I was waiting at 5 metres below sea level waiting for the 3 minute safety stop to be up. Then I looked at the diving instructor, motioned to him that I wasn't feeling too great, and vomited into my regulator.

At the time, I was too busy vomiting to notice, but my diving instructor swore to me that there was an incredible array of fish that came to feed off my regurgitated breakfast.

We had our break and I was feeling incredibly worse for wear. I'm not sure if I was feeling sea-sick from the boat ride. The water wasn't even that choppy! It was time to go down again for our second dive. I wasn't feeling terribly great but I was convinved that I'd feel better when I was down under the water again. I had only lasted about 15 minutes before I motioned to the instructor that I had to surface.

I was zonked by the end of the day. For the rest of the afternoon and the evening, I kept feeling like I was on the boat and a wave had hit me again and again. Thank god for stemetil.

So a fortnight later, we went out again and it was a bit choppier this time. I had drunk about a liter of ginger tea and had had no dairy for breakfast. I wasn't taking any chances. It was pineapple and toast for breakfast and tea without milk. So when I went down and felt that familiar feeling of nausea AGAIN, it was amusing to see bits of undigested pineapple projecting out of my regulator mouthpiece.

Since then, I've been to a little island called Caqalai and have successfully gone on 3 dives with only 1 vomit. Apparently there are two Amandas that go to Caqalai and I'm known as the vomiting Amanda, even though I haven't vomited all that much over there. It's been worth it though. I've seen nudibranches, sea turtles, a moray eel, butterfly fish, clown fish and god knows how many other amazingly coloured fish.

Emily has now gotten to know my signals for "time to chuck" and I am so glad she is there for me as she's the one who stops me from floating back up to the surface. I am beginning to think that it's all in my head and that I don't suffer from nausea...I'm just completely freaked out that I will vomit, to the point that I make myself sick thinking about it. The other theory is that I swallow too much air when I'm under the surface that when I come up again, the air bubbles in my stomach becomes so large that they stimulate a gag reflex as they grow larger.

I also went to Taveuni and saw some amazing sights: stereotypical nemos (clown fish) in molluscs, a table of coral and anemone with HEAPS of clown fish, a sea hermit crab thingo, these long eel-looking like fish, a reef shark, sea cucumber, coral that changes colour when you touch it. I just wish I had a camera and/or a fish book to know what I was looking at!

Oh yes, I vomited multiple times in Taveuni as well.

So anyway, this concludes my diving journey for now. I will go diving again despite feeling ill all the time. Afterall, it's only a transient nausea which goes away as soon as I've evacuated all contents of my stomach.

...and I also get to see way more fish this way :)